Nexus 4 Updated Benchmark Scores Show The Real Power Of The S4 Pro SoC

A few days ago the Nexus 4 review embargo was lifted and all the popular websites including The Verge and Engadget posted a review of the handset. However, AnandTech — one of the most respected tech website out there – only posted an ‘in-depth’ preview of the Nexus 4, giving us a sneak peek into its performance and battery life.

AnandTech’s preview painted a very disappointing picture of the Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core Krait processor used inside the Nexus 4. On paper, the S4 Pro SoC should absolutely blow the competition apart. But, in AnandTech’s benchmark the handset performed very poorly, sometimes being bested by its own dual-core sibling – the S4. Brian Klug clearly mentioned in the preview that it looked like the Nexus 4 was constantly throttling itself down due to over-heating whenever he was running benchmarks on the phone.

Well, since we are all curious as to how the Nexus 4 performs without the throttling issues, Brian decided to put the Nexus 4 inside a freezer in a zip bag and re-run the benchmarks. So, how did the Nexus 4 perform when there were no throttling issues?

The updated benchmark score clearly reflect what the SoC inside the Nexus 4 is capable of doing. The full updated benchmark scores are not yet available, but should be soon, once Brian is done with his full review.

So do we really need to worry about the Nexus 4 over-heating and throttling itself to prevent frying itself? Sadly, I am in no position and an expert to answer this. However, Brian did tweet that “the Nexus 4 thermal limits seem rather low, the phone doesn’t get *that* hot externally to me.” It might very well be possible that the retail units of the Nexus 4 have a higher thermal limit to solve this issue.

I will suggest our readers to wait until AnandTech posts a full in-depth review of the Nexus 4 before jumping to conclusions about the performance and over-heating issues of the Nexus 4.